Building a Life of Strength, Courage, and Meaning

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“Filled with practical ideas and the latest research, True Resilience is a fantastic guide to thriving in work and life!”

—Tom Rath
#1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Move Sleep and How Full Is Your Bucket?

Resilience is much more than bouncing back from a difficult life event, according to Dr. Gail Wagnild, one of the nation’s leading researchers in the field.

In True Resilience, she shows it’s about cultivating five essential characteristics and four habits that help you adapt to the flow of life while never losing sight of who you are and your life purpose. Her book is filled with inspirational stories, proven research, and questionnaires to help readers apply every point to their own lives.

As a young woman, Dr. Wagnild found herself raising a newborn, navigating a divorce, helping her terminally ill father, working full time, enduring theft, and much more.

“Easy to read and very relatable, True Resilience is a great book for anyone going through a rough time and feeling stressed out.”

—Diane Lang, MA
author of Creating Balance and Finding Happiness

Even then she was beginning decades of seminal research into the nature of resilience. She would go on to survey thousands of ordinary people across the nation who’d developed extraordinary resilience. The research would lead to the famous Resilience Scale™, a 25-statement survey that measures personal resilience.

At the outset, though, she was learning resilience from her research subjects.

“Pain and grief had transformed them into people who could feel empathy for others’ pain and accept circumstances they couldn’t change,” Dr. Wagnild writes. “As I listened to their stories, I felt hope that I could make it through my difficult journey and perhaps become stronger and more resilient as well.”

“Path-blazing… Twenty-five years of research delivers a work of pure honesty and discovery.”

—Elisabeth A. Doehring
President and Founder
North American Center for Worksite Wellness™

Today she offers readers that same hope. In these pages, she shows you what she discovered scientifically and personally—how to achieve a sense of purpose, perseverance, self-reliance, equanimity, and authenticity. You also will learn habits that will help you renew and refresh yourself so you stay strong, healthy, brave, and focused. They work because resilience isn’t a trait you do or do not possess. It’s a way to live.

Dr. Wagnild offers both science and inspiration in conversational language. She also peppers True Resilience with simple but powerful illustrative stories from her home state of Montana, including one about the Lincoln Pass, where she once drove an old pickup pulling a U-Haul trailer until a rear wheel blew out. Even such everyday moments, she writes, offer us opportunities to strengthen ourselves.

“True Resilience can help anyone confidently stare down the barriers they face every day and build avenues to destinations that were falsely labeled unreachable.”

You’ll learn, too, from the stories of famous people, including how Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor faces fear and how playwright Neil Simon approaches his creative life without worrying about success or failure.

By the end of True Resilience, your mind will be filled with positive thoughts, examples, and ways to meet life, no matter what it brings you.